Timothy O'Reilly, born 1954 in Cork, Ireland, is the director of O'Reilly Media (formally O'Reilly & Associates), and a notable proponent of the ideas of free, open source, software, and the Web 2.0 movement. On the board of Macromedia until it merged with Adobe in 2005, he has responsible for a large amount of software design.

In 2001, he also initiated a dispute with the online book-store Amazon, which he claimed was filing offensive patents against rival companies, arguing that it was trying to stifle the free-flow of ideas. On this subject, he said

'The Net is so evanescent -- there's no archive. It's very likely that there's not much evidence of that first use [of a given technology]'

This dispute ended with an agreement with Amazon that it would no longer file patents in this way.